Nitish Kumar’s NDA will confront challenger Tejashwi Yadav and disrupter Prashant Kishor—and, unlike 2020, Chirag Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party has returned to the ruling fold. At a brief press conference on October 6, the Chief Election Commissioner announced the schedule: Bihar will vote in two phases, on November 6 and 11, with counting set for November 14.
For a state that long treated elections as an ordeal of attrition, Bihar 2025 has been compressed into a tight, theatre-like contest: two rounds of polling, 243 assembly seats and 122 the magic number for a simple majority. The shortness of the timetable only sharpens what is at stake: not merely who will govern, but which idiom of politics will prove more persuasive—governance, welfare or reinvention.
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In a polity where assembly contests have, for decades, tended towards a bipolar confrontation between an RJD–Congress front and the JD(U)–BJP combine (with smaller partners threading in and out), this year’s poll opens the credible possibility of a triangular fight. Prashant Kishor aims, in the manner of the strategist-turned-politician, at a little over a quarter of the electorate that in 2020 voted for neither the Mahagathbandhan nor the NDA.
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